Jackie Clark, a Des Moines resident who was displaced from her home in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, volunteers at community events. / Charlie Litchfield/The Register

Written by

Ann Hinga Klein

Special to The Register

How to help

C.R.O.S.S. Ministries has established a fund to help with the costs of Jackie Clark’s relocation. For more information, contact Mike Sitzman at 641-414-1675 or mike50213@yahoo.com. To learn more about the organization, go to crossministries-ia.com.

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Jackie Clark, who has given hundreds of volunteer hours to Des Moines organizations since her evacuation to Iowa in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, took a step closer to her goal last month when a small Osceola humanitarian agency offered to help with the expenses and logistics of a return move to New Orleans.

Mike Sitzman, founder and director of C.R.O.S.S. Ministries, said he and his family were touched by a story about Clark in The Des Moines Sunday Register on Oct. 13. He said the nonprofit — which provides used medical equipment to hospitals in developing countries — assisted Gulf Coast homeowners after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and would transport Clark’s possessions and fund airfare or provide ground transportation, even if he had to personally fund the effort.

“Any of us that grew up on the farm realize you’ve got to figure out ways to get things done,” said Sitzman, who pulls from a deep well of stories about times he was unable to shake the needs of a friend or stranger. “If your neighbor needs help getting his crops out, you do whatever you need to get the crops out. I think that’s what makes Iowans unique.”

Clark, 67, has no known family and relies on a mobility scooter for transportation. She said that in the evacuation conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she and others weren’t informed of their destination until the flight they had been ordered to board was airborne. She later learned all of the possessions in her New Orleans apartment had been looted.

While Clark expressed gratitude for her safety in Iowa, she also described feelings of isolation and hopelessness following the ordeal. Volunteering at Des Moines music and theater events got her out of her small downtown apartment and reminded her of the French Quarter venues where she had worked as a waitress and bartender for years, until she was disabled in a fall getting off a bus.

A complicated road home

Like many Gulf Coast evacuees, Clark has faced complex obstacles in her quest to return home. James Perry, executive director of the nonprofit Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, recently described the “family army” it took to help his grandparents navigate a labyrinth of program requirements and unscrupulous contractors in their own return journey.

“Even eight years later, after billions of dollars and investment and recovery, about a hundred thousand people who were forced out have yet to return,” he said. “And I think … they found over and over again that the process is extremely difficult.” He and others described a disconnect between evacuees spread across the country and assistance funded by FEMA, state and local agencies.

The United Methodist Committee On Relief (UMCOR) was among organizations contracted to provide relocation assistance to evacuees from late 2007 to early 2009. Catherine Earl, executive secretary of disaster response with UMCOR in Washington, D.C., recently recalled that a case manager had been in Iowa, but also said FEMA help line operators hadn’t seemed consistently trained to connect callers with case managers in their areas.

She also said that as a renter, Clark would have been “very hard for us to help” because affordable housing was extremely limited while the program was in effect. Many evacuees who returned ended up living in vehicles and under highway overpasses.

“Our case managers began helping me understand why people wanted to go back at any cost,” she said. “They had been there generation after generation. It was a special place for them. I began to understand why, but it still didn’t change the fact that they had no affordable housing to go back to.”

She and others also described New Orleans as dangerous in Katrina’s aftermath for individuals with limited resources and mobility. Hospitals, grocery stores and public transportation in some areas were closed for years.

Affordable rental housing has continued to be an issue, they said, and now that FEMA-funded programs have expired, returnees have no federal agency to contact for help locating housing.

A manager at one apartment complex for low-income seniors in the Mid-City neighborhood, where Clark lived before Katrina, said last week that the wait list there was at 450. She could not estimate how long it would take to reach the top of the list.

Clark added her name and said she hoped to locate an apartment in her old neighborhood by the summer of 2015. Meanwhile, she had been surprised by the well wishes of patrons at the Des Moines events where she volunteers.

“Complete strangers have come up to me and hugged me and said that they saw my article,” she said. “All the people I have talked to have said they understand that I just want to go back home.”

Correction: Jackie Clark’s mother died in 1992. The article published Oct. 13 inadvertently listed the year as 1972.